TravelMole Interview: Jill Chalmers, All-Hotels.com

The All-Hotels.com managing director tells TravelMole how the website has maintained customers despite offering room rates above the industry average.

“We are finding that our hotel rates are higher than the industry average. We do not always demand from hotels that they must discount their rates to go on the site. Price is still number one but the consumer is generally spending more with us” Ms Chalmers told TravelMole.

According to the the All-Hotels md, the average room rate in London was about £20 higher on the All-Hotels website than the average room rate calculated in a recent KPMG survey of London hotels.

She said: “I think we can charge the higher rate because consumers like the site. It is easy to search and the booking process is simple and quick. This sort of functionality takes the focus away from price.”

Ms Chalmers says All-Hotels sells about 15,000 room nights a month. The customer base is international, although the majority – 60% is from the US and 25% is from Europe.

Ms Chalmers could not give the figure of what percentage of customers come through search engines to All-Hotels.com, only to say it is “a tremendous amount”. She said that the website’s success was also down to the retention of customers. According to Ms Chalmers, “about 18% of customers are repeat visitors, which is very high for a website.”

Hotels post inventory on the website free of charge, and agree to either a merchant model, which means All-Hotels adds a mark-up, or a commission agreement where the hotel hands over an agreed commission to All-Hotels per booking.

The latest agreement signed by All-Hotels is with Orient Express, which sees the addition of 40 hotels around the world. The deal is on a commission basis, and takes All-Hotels inventory of global hotels to over 100,000. “I think this makes us the largest online hotel agent, in terms of volume” said Ms Chalmers.

All-Hotels is owned by OTC, so some of its inventory is also featured on some of the other websites owned and powered by OTC.

“The connection with OTC means we also sell flights, but hotels remains the focus” said Ms Chalmers.

She added that she had high hopes for the online hotel sector over the coming months: “The growth of online business in the hotel segment will see the biggest growth in the next two years. Flights have grown massively but I think that is stabilising.”

Read our previous stories:
25-Nov-2002 Chalmers named as All-Hotels MD
25-Sept-2002 OTC adds 60,000 hotels through acquisition